Mom is moving to memory care on Monday and it’s not as bad as I feared. It’s actually a huge relief for both of us.
Mom and I have lived in fear and dread of memory care for the past six years. Mom referred to it as “the Loony Bin for when I get really bad.” I thought that my job was to help her stay in her assisted living apartment for as long as possible. We went from mom needing me to set up her meds once a week to mom needing aides to come twice a day to give her pills. I started doing her laundry because she forgot how to use the washer down the hall. I started buying her bottled coffee drinks because she forgot how to use her coffee maker. I started taking out her garbage because it stopped occurring to her to do so. Mom worked as hard as she could to stay in her apartment. She accepted the clunky calendar clock on the kitchen table to keep her oriented to day and time, the ugly phone with her kids’ and sisters’ names on the buttons to make it easier to call us. She faithfully wore the ugly ID bracelet I got for her in case she got lost on walks in the neighborhood. We both were working as hard as we could. When she would ask me if there was somewhere else she could live I would get offended. There is no place else I told her. This is the best we can do.
Then I got the call that police officers had brought mom back to assisted living when she got lost on one of her walks. I hired an aide to go for a walk with her every morning and she surprised me by totally loving this. She had been so afraid of getting lost. I felt terrible for not hiring someone to do this sooner. I asked assisted living to turn on an alarm so an aide would look for her if she left her apartment at night. This was how we learned that in the middle of the night she goes down to the lobby and waits for someone to pick her up.
I started letting myself see things I was too sad and scared to acknowledge. Mom goes down for lunch at 10 a.m. on Sundays because she has forgotten how to make a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Mom wears the same outfit all week. Mom gets angry and scared and demands to move somewhere else on weekends when there are no staff people in the lobby. Mom wasn’t asking to move back to her house. She was asking to move someplace where there would always be someone available if she was confused or scared.
When we finally toured memory care together in another building on her campus, it was not dreadful or scary. The people who lived and worked there were funny and caring. What had seemed boring and restricting to me when mom was more cognitively intact, feels gentle and safe now that she can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality.
Mom’s move to memory care breaks my heart again but I am grateful that it has turned out to be a joint decision we got to make together. I miss my former mom so much but I love this version of my mom who continues to be kind and reasonable and loving. It could be so much worse. It’s hard but it isn’t scary. I’m very grateful that she isn’t scared.
We toured memory care again today because mom didn’t quite remember touring it last Thursday. I read though the moving checklist while we were looking at her new room again and realized that the people at memory care will do her laundry. All I could think was, crap, they will see the terrible, raggedy underwear that I let my mom wear because I have been too fucking tired to take her shopping for new underwear. So after we toured memory care we went to Target and drank Starbucks and bought pretty bras and underpants. It had been such a long time since we had fun together. I looked at the racks of bras—purple, white, mocha, peach—and thought of the iris blooming in the early summer: 44DD domesticated white and apricot varieties in Minneapolis yards on my morning runs and 32A wild purple varieties blooming on Wolfe Lake on my bike rides home from the hospital. I thought of the Louise Glück poem, The Wild Iris, that opens “At the end of my suffering there was a door.” There is joy after fear. A door opens into a world of light and beautiful colors and you can breathe again.
helloheidiland 